Possessed: January 28, 2018

Year B, Epiphany 4                                                     
Mark 1:21-29                                                 

 

            Recently my husband and I were talking about a yearly event that we attend.  It’s not my favorite event in the world, but it’s also not completely horrible, nor is it particularly memorable.  This year my husband reminded me of one almost 10 years ago.  “Do you remember how mad you were?  I had to take away your car keys.”  I looked at him like he was stark raving mad, because I had no memory of the incident he was referring to. He reminded me of what happened that made me so mad and it started coming back to me.  I remember being very annoyed, but I don’t remember being enraged.  I thought, “Why would that have made me so mad?  How stupid to be mad about something so trivial.”  In my defense, someone did something pretty rude and embarrassed me in a public setting and made me feel small and foolish.  I confess, the more I thought about the incident, the more I remembered the anger.  I could feel it 10 years later.  But to be so enraged my husband did not trust me to drive? That seems excessive.

            Anger is not necessarily a bad thing.  There are times when it is appropriate to be angry.  Jesus got angry, especially in the face on injustice and hypocrisy.  Anger becomes dangerous when it envelops you and clouds your very being…when it almost becomes part of who you are, your very essence.  We can say that about a lot of things. Fear, competition, confidence, success, desire… None of these things are bad…but they can take us over at times. They can possess us and change how we think and act.

            The Gospel of Mark does not start the same way that the other gospels do.  There is no dramatic story of Jesus’ birth like there is in Matthew and Luke.   There is no poetic prologue like there is in the Gospel of John.  The Gospel of Mark begins with John the Baptist and moves quickly to Jesus baptism, the temptation in the desert and the calling of his first disciples.  This is all in the first 20 verses of the first chapter.  Those first 20 verses are full of important events, events and people critical to the life of Jesus and to the Christian faith.  After reading those 20 verses, we would expect that the next event would be equally important.

            That brings us to today’s reading. Our story for today starts in a fairly typical fashion.  Jesus went to the synagogue and began to teach.  Everyone was impressed with his teaching.  Then the unexpected.  A man possessed by demons approached Jesus…no it’s more like he confronted Jesus.  The demon recognized Jesus immediately.  Everyone else saw Jesus as a teacher, perhaps even a prophet.  But the demon identified Jesus as the Holy One of God. 

            Of course Jesus did what we would expect him to do.  He freed the man from the demon. He exorcised him.  This was Jesus’s first miracle in the Gospel of Mark.  Exorcism.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus turned water into wine as his first miracle.  In Matthew,  he cured lots of people who were sick.  In Mark, one of the first things he does in his public ministry is exorcise a demon.  Surely Jesus could have picked something different.  He could have healed a small child or a wounded animal…but why get involved with a demon?

            The Gospel writer must have thought this was important if he put it in the very first chapter.  Now I know we all get a little antsy when we start talking about demons and evil spirits.  I don’t know what to tell you about the existence of demons, but I do believe that there is very real evil in the world.  Mark knew this.  Jesus knew this.  Thus one of his fist acts was to confront that evil and free a person of that evil. It wasn’t some abstract thing…it was there right in front of him, possessing a human, a child of God. 

We don’t hear much about the man who was possessed.  We know he was a man possessed.  That is it.  Part of me wants to know more about this man, how it happened, how he made it into the synagogue, what happened next? But the other part of me knows that none of that really matters. What matters is that this man was a child of God, a child of God who was being suffocated by something evil, something that controlled him.  Thus Jesus’ first act was not merely exorcising a demon. He was giving someone their freedom back.  He was giving this person back his identity as a beloved child of God.  If we look at it that way, then it makes sense that this would be one of his first acts.

            In the Episcopal Church, we don’t talk about demons much, or being possessed.  Yet I believe that most of us know what it is to be shackled by something.  It might bad relationship or job. It might be an addiction or an emotion that has taken over.  It might be guilt or something from the past that continues to plague us.  It might be an illness or a pain that has made us feel less than whole.

It doesn’t have to be something that is bad in and of itself. It could be money and belongings.  They can possess us. We can be possessed by knowledge that makes us arrogant and closed minded.  We can be possessed by fears, fears that keep us from seeing others as beloved children of God. We can be possessed by anger, some of it righteous anger, some of it just plain foolish. 

            Jesus seeks to free us from those things.  Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being controlled by something like anger or jealousy. I don’t like it when fear keeps me from doing good things for other people.  Sometimes I wish that we could just stick with the demon language.  When my husband told me about that time I was enraged over something foolish, I could have said, well that was a demon. That would be so much easier. We know demons are bad.  In stories like today, they seem to be eliminated with expediency. It is not the same with these amorphous things and feelings that possess us. They are much harder to get rid of. Sometimes we do not even realize we are possessed. 

            One of the interesting things about the story of the exorcism is that we don’t know what happened to the demon.  What we know is that Jesus continued to exorcise people. It seemed that he never quite conquered evil; he freed people from whatever possessed them.  He healed one person at a time. But he never rid the world of all evil. He was only able to heal the people who came to him, who knew that they needed his saving grace. That is what Jesus continues to ask of all of us….that we come to him, that we admit that we need him.  We might have to keep coming back.  I am fairly certain we will.  Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t keep count—he’s just happy to see us.

God's word is not as rare as our silence: January 14, 2018

Year B, Epiphany 2                                                                

1 Samuel 3:1-20                                                                      

Every priest and deacon has to go through a thorough process of discernment before being ordained.  Before you can even go to seminary, there is a lengthy interview process, sometimes an internship and you have to show that you have the support of your parish priest, the vestry, and a separate committee in the church.  For 6 years I sat on the committee for the diocese that walks along people who are hoping to be ordained.  During those 6 years I heard a lot of stories of people who felt that they were called to the ministry.  Typically people’s stories were more nuanced than you might expect.  For most people, there was rarely one moment when clarity struck.  The call came over years, even decades.  There was no thunder and lightning.  No one ever started their story with, “God spoke to me and said, ‘You need to be a priest’.”  Sometimes the call would come through life events and often the encouraging words of others.

            It is strange because if you look at the stories in the Bible, of people who were called to various ministries (whether it was prophet, disciple, mother of God, etc)---it was usually more direct.  God spoke to people in dreams and visions.  For Moses, his physical appearance changed after he spoke to God.  It was that obvious. Paul was blinded and a voice came from heaven.  For Mary, an angel appeared and spoke to her.  It seems that in those days, God was a lot more direct.  Yet in this day and time, in the modern age, God is a lot more subtle in the way that he communicates.  There have been many times in my life, when I wished God would be less subtle, more like he was in the stories in the Bible. 

            One of the first verses from our Old Testament reading for today is, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”  This got my attention, because this is the Bible after all.  It’s God’s word. You don’ expect that the Bible would mention a time when God’s word was rare. Yet even then, in the time of the great prophets and kings, even then there were periods when God seemed less communicative than usual.  The Hebrew word translated to rare typically referred to things like jewelry, anything that was rare and limited in supply.  Other translations use the word precious.  God’s word was precious. 

            The other reason it seems a little odd that the word of God would be so rare in this story is the location.  The boy in this story (Samuel) is living in the temple, as a servant/apprentice of the high priest.  He was living in the temple.  The text says that he was sleeping in the room where the ark of God was housed.  The ark of God was the place where God was supposed to reside.  The ark was the closest thing to the embodiment of God.  It was the closest you could get.  Yet even there, feet away from the ark of God, the word of the Lord was rare.  It must have been a dark time indeed.  But as you know, just because something is rare and precious, does not mean that it is impossible to attain. 

            This story of Samuel and the voice of God is fairly well known. Typically when we talk about it, we think of Samuel’s refrain, “Here I am.”  Even the popular hymn you just heard repeats this refrain, “Here I am.”  As a result, I have always imagined that this is the way we respond to the voice of God, with assurance, confidence, with a loud, “Here I am. It’s me. I’m who you are talking to.”  Yet what is interesting is that was how Samuel responded when he thought it was Eli calling him. 

Remember that the word of God was rare.  Samuel didn’t know what it sounded like.  In our text, there is an exclamation point after his name.  Samuel! Samuel! But we don’t really know what the voice of the Lord sounded like.  It probably didn’t sound like James Earl Jones.  It was probably quiet, more like a murmur than a voice from heaven. Therefore, it was not that odd that he assumed it was the elderly priest Eli.  Samuel responded as any good servant, by jumping to his feet and proclaiming, “Here I am.”  Even after 3 times of hearing this, he still jumped to his feet and ran to Eli.  Who knows, he might have done that all night had Eli not figured things out and given him some advice. 

            Now had I been in Eli’s position, I would gave jumped up as well and tried to get some more details from Samuel before formulating a plan where I would have joined Eli as we chatted and waited for the next call from God.  But Eli was wise and probably a little tired as well. He told Samuel to lie down and wait. The next time God called, Eli instructed him to say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” Samuel did exactly that.  He did not bounce out of bed and say, “Here I am!”  Instead he asked God to speak and made sure that God knew that he was listening. 

Because of that, God spoke and shared something that would change Samuel’s life, Eli’s life and shape the fate of Israel. I have always assumed that God was waiting for Samuel to realize that it was God talking before sharing his wisdom.  But I think God was waiting for some evidence, some confirmation that Samuel was ready to listen. He wasn’t just the eager pupil bouncing up and down in his seat desperate to be called on so he could speak…he was the servant ready to listen. 

It is hard to know whether the word of God is rare now, or if it is just listening that is rare.  It’s hard to listen.  If this story of Samuel and Eli happened today, Samuel would have had ear buds in with music blaring.  Or he would have been playing a video game or chatting online with someone. Eli would have been sound asleep with his white noise machine or maybe the TV on.  It’s hard to listen because there is so much noise.  It’s not just that the word of God is rare today.  Silence is rare.  It is so rare that it is precious. 

Because it is precious, it is that much more important that we seek it, that we strive for moments of silence, moments when we can not only step away from the constant noise that surrounds us, but even the chatter inside our heads.  God doesn’t usually speak to us with exclamation points.  He doesn’t even use emoji.  But I promise you that his word isn’t as rare as our ability to listen. 

One of the things that helped Samuel was Eli, someone who was there with him and was able to point Samuel in the right direction.  That is what the faith community is for. Church is the place you come to hear God’s word.  You may not hear it in the readings, or the music, or the sermon. But this is the place where we intentionally make space for God’s word.  That hour of worship might not be enough which is why we have different groups, Bible study, the men’s group, the adult forum, St. Anne’s guild, the young adult group…places where you can go to be with other people who are trying to listen for the voice of God.  You can also come to Mark or me and we will listen to you and with you.  Because whether you know it or not, God is speaking to you.  God is desperate to talk to you.  Not only are God’s words precious, you are precious in God’s eyes…which is why he never gives up.  He never stops trying to reach you…no matter who you are or where you are from. You are precious.